Now there’s a better way to search officers on OpenCorporates

A recent investigation by the Private Eye found 4,300 companies registered at a London address with Chinese officers. Amongst these is a company which acts as a company secretary to 3,700 anonymous companies (read their full investigation here).

How did they do this? With the powerful OpenCorporates API/data dump, which allowed them to find directors with Chinese nationality and then narrow that down to addresses at which companies were registered.

Now that sort of power has come to the main OpenCorporates website. If you’ve been using OpenCorporates to search the 173 million (and increasing) officer records across 69 jurisdictions, somewhere along the line you’ve wondered how cool it would be to be able to filter results better through the website. Well, we’ve made your wish come true.

You can now search for officers by:

• Name
• Address
• status (active/inactive)

Once you get the search results, you can filter by

• position of officers
• Jurisdiction
• and in the case of UK, by Nationality and Occupation

Not all jurisdictions make officers data available so you won’t be able to see officer data for them. Additionally, companies can also be officers so don’t be surprised to find them in the search results.

UK has the richest officer data of all the data sets, which is why you can also filter by nationality and find some interesting results. For instance, did you know that the top country of birth for officers is Ireland, USA, Germany, France and India.

 

Here are some videos showing how to use the filter function.

 

 

Here’s how you look up a director by addresses…

 

 

And allows you to discover some interesting things like…

 

 

There is only 1 officer with the name ‘Hussain’ in Croatia out of the 66,258 around the world. Let’s look at what happens when you search for ‘David’. You can see there are more than 3 million results!

 

 

By default, the website will only show you 20 jurisdictions. If you click on ‘show all’, you will see the top 150 jurisdictions.

 

 

It’s worth keeping in mind that companies can be officers too so sometimes you’ll come across company profiles, such as this.

 

 

As we add more officer data from other jurisdictions, this search and filter functionality will become even richer and you’ll be able to cast wider and narrower nets to find what you’re looking for. If you come across some interesting examples, don’t forget to tweet them to us!